Who Decides ‘Who Won’?

The New York Times‘ Jim Rutenberg had a follow-up piece on Friday’s debate headlined “The Next Day, a New Debate on Who Won.” The story described the McCain and Obama camps’ attempts at “influencing the public perception of who won an encounter that produced no clear winner or loser.”

Except–is it really true that the debate produced no clear winner? The initial polls pointed to Obama as a winner; CNN‘s poll released Friday night found that 51 percent of respondents thought Obama had done a better job, vs. 38 percent for McCain. CBS‘s Friday night poll of undecided voters had 40 percent calling Obama the winner, 22 percent saying McCain. Clearly, “winning” a presidential debate means improving your chances of getting elected, so polls of the public would appear to offer the best evidence of who “won.”

Rutenberg alludes to these polls, yet dismisses them: “Mr. Obama appeared to have an edge in the various snap polls taken the night of the debate, though these are notoriously unreliable,” Rutenberg wrote in the second half of the 18th paragraph–his only mention of polling data.

It’s not clear how the polls immediately after a debate are “unreliable” gauges of who the public thought won that debate; while polling has its limitations, surely it’s more accurate than pundits’ speculations about who the electorate would think the winner would be. A less time-pressed USA Today/Gallup poll taken the day after the debate, and probably not available to Rutenberg before his deadline, confirmed the results of the “flash” polls: 39 percent said Obama won vs. 28 percent for McCain; among those who actually watched the debate, it was 46 percent Obama vs. 34 percent McCain.

But for Rutenberg, the public’s own response seems to be rather beside the point; his story is about “campaigns go[ing] full-bore to convince the news media, and ultimately the public, that their candidate won,” since it’s “a common belief in presidential politics” that “many viewers base their judgment not necessarily on debate performance but on what they read and see in the days afterward.”

In other words, it’s the media’s job to tell the public whom they thought won the debate.

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Extra! Magazine Editor Since 1990, Jim Naureckas has been the editor of Extra!, FAIR's monthly journal of media criticism. He is the co-author of The Way Things Aren't: Rush Limbaugh's Reign of Error, and co-editor of The FAIR Reader: An Extra! Review of Press and Politics in the '90s. He is also the co-manager of FAIR's website. He has worked as an investigative reporter for the newspaper In These Times, where he covered the Iran-Contra scandal, and was managing editor of the Washington Report on the Hemisphere, a newsletter on Latin America. Jim was born in Libertyville, Illinois, in 1964, and graduated from Stanford University in 1985 with a bachelor's degree in political science. Since 1997 he has been married to Janine Jackson, FAIR's program director. You can follow Jim on Twitter at @JNaureckas.

It seems as though there are never any ‘winners’ and honestly, should there be? It seems once you reach a certain age you generally pick your party and stick with it. The other day I was having a conversation with my mother and she mentioned that she liked McCain. I derided her for making such a comment, but it demonstrates a point. A large number of the elderly public are more likely to vote republican than democrat. Debates are meant to inform people of where the candidates stand on certain issues and people pick their issues and vote accordingly. Winning and losing is simply decided by the vote, not the debate. The problem is when the candidates get their facts wrong or try to spin them.